version

Well-known member
The other night I ended up watching a clip of Alan Moore being interviewed by John Higgs on the 20th century, particularly Moore's thing in From Hell of it being 'birthed' by the Ripper murders, and it ended up spiraling off into a discussion of Lovecraft being the birth of modern horror, the impact of science fiction on people like von Braun and the idea that America's relative lack of history meant that they had to look to the future.


Anyway...

Do you think there's any overarching structure to the 20th century? What comes to mind when you think of it? What do you feel were the most significant events, inventions and discoveries? Do you view it as an anomaly or a continuation?
 
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luka

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In some ways it's more of the 19th century, al least in terms of technology. Politically there are significant ruptures as a result of the world wars and the break up of the European empires.
 

luka

Well-known member
But I like telling people that Greenwich is the most important site in the history of capitalism. The standardisation of time and space. The tea clippers able to reach Asia in 100 days, faster than any steam ship of the time. The highest development of sail ship technology.
 

luka

Well-known member
For all its hideous aesthetics in Greenwich you can understand what the steampunk stuff is driving at. There is a kind of high Victorian magic. The future is being created.

On the churches thread I was talking about the masons, this counter current to religion; mathematics, engineering, technology, observation, measurement, this is what the steampunk stuff is tracking. The Royal society. This is the current that really becomes predominant in the 19th with industrialisation and the global economy.
 
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luka

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Red dead redemption 2 is 19th century with the poisoned swamps and the coal mines and the factories spewing noxious smoke into the air.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't mind admitting I love this


"The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip."
 

luka

Well-known member
"...there used to be discussed something we christened 'The Break'. We did not discover the phenomenon so described; it had been evident in various ways to various people for perhaps a century; it is now, I suppose, apparent to most. Or at least most see that in the 19th century, Western Man moved across a Rubicon which, if as unseen as the 38th parallel, seems to have been as definitive as the Styx."

David Jones preface to the anathemata
 

luka

Well-known member
The 19th has newspapers the 20th, radio and then television. These as ways of engineering a collective consciousness, tuned to the same bandwidth, as well as ways of transmitting information.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't mind admitting I love this


"The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip."

This is the prose equivalent of lyrical miracle rap music.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My view is that it's nice and satisfying to think that a century has a character but it's also a fabrication. A convenience.

I suppose the fact that people KNOW they're living in, say, 1999 effects how they act. Or even knowing that they're living in 1983 not 1764. (Haven't things moved on?)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
But like I said I'm a sucker for the convenience of it.

We like stories, it's how we explain the world. I'm currently already telling myself a story about my day.
 

luka

Well-known member
My view is that it's nice and satisfying to think that a century has a character but it's also a fabrication. A convenience.

I suppose the fact that people KNOW they're living in, say, 1999 effects how they act. Or even knowing that they're living in 1983 not 1764. (Haven't things moved on?)

Isn't this boring though?
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't see how you can reasonably look at the 19th and not consider industrialisation as fundamental to its character. It's not just random events that could of happened at any point in the timeline. That's silly.
 

kumar

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there was this thing on the back page of the lrb that was a eton gossip girl column by a guy who was there at the same time as boris and rees mogg and he talks about how they all get the jan morris book on the british empire when they start which creates this depraved victorian worship, which is moronic clearly. but the things that seem amazing in the wake of computers, increasing virtuality and seemingly ineffable technological processes in modern life, are the absurdly literal heights that some of the inventions reached. pneumatic tubes being the pinnacle. just crazy enough to work.
 
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